Failure to Breathe
by Starriecat
Summary: Sasuke keeps turning and turning away from the mess that he made. He can't breathe; can't look back at the boy whose too-bright grin slipped off his face like it crashed into a two-ton truck. NaruSasu.


Disclaimer: Naruto is Sasu--er, Kishimoto's, not mine. XD'

A/N: Set in Sasuke-chan's poor perspective. x3 The re-write of 'Gagging, Spitting, Still Breath Failing', but I decided to repost this as a different fic since they're essentially 2 different takes on it; this version's about twice as long, funnier and a little more emotionally intense. :3 Please tell moi which version you liked better! ;D -heart-

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**Breath Failure**

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Sometimes it's weird; suddenly, things just don't seem to matter. The rain's cold and fierce as it dashes your skin so fast; like if it could just go fast enough, you'd melt off into a puddle onto the floor and never move from being just that ever again: a blur that passes and goes without anyone noticing. 

But when you start sinking into that eerily pleasurable feeling, suddenly its like some merry friggin' daisy got shoved into your throat; even as you're forced to gag and bite down the damn thing, you can't seem to make your jaw unhinge enough to let it go. Its ridiculous. It really shouldn't be this hard.

Still, for some reason you find yourself still inhaling the noxious perfume of your lawn for a longer extended period of time than you should be allowing yourself to be knocked into this state; gagging and about as close to the verge of choking as any Uchiha's ever gone as you try not to swallow down dozens of pollen seeds with one too-sharp breath--

--suddenly the clenching muscles of your throat and lungs that are protesting and struggling until your face turns purple stop; can't remember why you couldn't fuckin' remember your nose. Yes, Uchiha, you have a nose; so relax, and stop trying to fucking choke when all you wanna do is taste the damn daisy anyway, dammit.

Wait. Your eyes widen abruptly, forgotten daisy dangling from your half-open mouth, a trail of drool hanging unceremoniously out of it.

Not…not that you like it.

Wh-why the fuck is it in your mouth, anyway?

Snapping your mouth back shut and grunting in one hasty male-Uchiha-dignity-saving-move, your perfect black Uchiha eyes dart anxiously from side-to-side, to make sure no one has witnessed your momentary slip-up from acceptable Uchiha-perfection--and with your perfectly mastered (Uchiha) glare, of course, just to make sure they keep quiet about it if they have.

Then suddenly try not to choke on the taste of rain and grass buttery fucking sunshine of your lawn.

...Right, that stupid daisy.

Licking the inside of your mouth quickly, your eyes unconsciously flash with pleasure; then the briefest flash of mortification, hastily nudged aside with forced irritation as you wonder if spitting will wash out the taste. Things you like too much tend to make you feel out of control, and then you feel antsy. Naruto used to say you were like a girl that way. (You still haven't come up with a comeback for that.)

Hastily you spit it out--perhaps a pace faster than was wholly necessary for a perfect Uchiha as yourself who does _not_ nearly choke to death via the very unpleasant route of asphixation/suffocation because you were too distracted by the taste of some fuckin' flower to remember you had a nose...no, never. Certainly not three minutes ago.

You wipe your mouth hastily on the back of your sleeve before the thoughts can take too much of an annoying turn and turn away, not looking at it as you hear it land on the sidewalk with an unceremonial splat. You don't twitch, or wince without quite knowing why either.

...Stupid daisy. It had it coming to it for messing with your head in the first place.

You walk away, hands in your pockets. Nope. That...didn't happen.

Not to you, anyway; a suddenly very tense and awkward boy, who isn't fighting back a swallow as he doesn't look back as that boy with the too-big grin chases after him--doesn't see that look on his face as that boy suddenly stops in his tracks, achingly-bright grin slipping off his face like a two-ton truck came and rolled it straight down with fat tires, straight straight down as his eyes roll into a cracked corner of a crushed daisy crushed into a spat of saliva of a foot in the sidewalk that suddenly seems so cold and cruel and very much wants to be abandoned and forgotten forever by a crushed boy who cannot stop turning and turning away from the mess that he made.

And he cannot stop to hear the squelch of the saliva that it made.

Or the sound of the laugh that just...stopped.

There's a chill in your jacket that wasn't there before, when you hike up your windbreaker suddenly from the draft that just passed up your spine when you felt the other boy's breath; choking slowly up the hitched grating back of a throat so dry...it was like the sun had just withered and died.

You turn away--faster, faster--breaking into a run, a strange sweat breaking uneasily down the back of your legs. Makes your breath hitch--your voice break in the back of your throat that shouldn't sound so choked-up and strangled--those hands, _your_ hands, trembling cold as you run, as you flee, gasping suddenly from--something---no, its not upset, its _not_, it _can't_ be, its--its just that--

The daisy in the rain you were forced to taste. The smell of it; yellow in the gray. The damp lawn; his smell that wafered over you suddenly like sunshine on your skin when he forced it in. You can taste it.

_(But you still couldn't tear it away.)_

After a moment, when he looks back up (_how can you still tell? why haven't you looked away yet, stopped listening even as your mind started screaming unconsciously, so terribly, so loud, that this felt so wrong it could kill you...?!_)

...He has changed.

That unbearable something in his eyes (_that nearly made you wish you'd just kept the damn daisy and turn you half-way back around…just until it went away again, and your hands stopped shaking--so--damned--**hard**--)_

--it's gone.


End file.
